Retro Freak v1.2 Disassembly

I made a quick video while opening this thing up, and thought someone might find it interesting. Sorry about the jump cuts.

Although my initial assumption when purchasing the Retro Freak was that it actually simulated console hardware using FPGA's, it became obvious that this was not the case once I had tested it.

It's my fault for being dazzled by its feature-set, and for thinking we'd come further along when it comes to simulating retro hardware in silicon; even though there are some wonderful efforts being made, not to mention retroUSB's production quality NES clone. I long for the day when something like the Retro Freak comes out, but with proper FPGA cores under the hood, rather than emulators running on a CPU.

That being said, the hardware inside the Retro Freak v1.2 is reasonably high-end: It uses a fairly common Rockchip RK3066 Cortex A-9 processor, which has a builtin VPU for 1080p HDMI video output. From the chip spec it looks like the Retro Freak has a whopping 32G of NAND Flash, as well as two 2GB DDR3 SRAM IC's. I'm not sure if the CPU can utilize 4GB, but there you go.

The cartridge slot interface is pretty interesting: There are two USB ports stemming from the base of the console. One is for the Genesys Logic USB Hub which is used for gamepad peripherals, and the other is for the Nuvoton NUC220 microcrontroller, which presumably contains some proprietary dumper code. The NUC220 has 128K of onboard Flash, 16K RAM and a bunch of IO handy for doing stuff like dumping roms, as well as an USB 2.0 interface. Although I've not yet had a closer look into this, I'm guessing that this provides a simple USB interface for accessing ROM data. Since the base connects to the Retro Freak mainboard via standard USB ports, it may be possible to utilize this chip (and hub of course) from a bespoke/homebrew board: A raspberry pi zero or the like could quite easily fit into the mainboard slot, and it's not difficult to imagine such things appearing in the future.

More detailed specifications are annotated in the video itself, and schematics dfor these components can easily be found online.